>>>Europe had the advantage of having the Soviet Union against which to show up a good face. South America had no such thing, so no propagandistic, people pampering action was needed. It was all up for grabs the easier way.
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>>Maybe so. I suspect, though, that it had more to do with the fact that the white ruling class of the U.S. came mostly originally from Europe, and it is a pretty tougher to flog your distant relatives than it is to stomp unrelated people. you would think, one would think, that the results of communism stopping actions in Latin America would have been much better if the U.S. had set up a good rather than a horrible example of how people are treated under the North American system. Is it any wonder that Venezuela, Bolivia and many other countries are now leaning heavily to the left.
>
>In a (coco)nutshell, while pulling the same cart, Europe got the carrot, South America got the stick.

That's it? We could have saved SO much paper that went into publishing history books about all this mess, as well as money spent on educating countless political scientists and historians to ponder all this. It all boils down to folksy carrots and sticks, eh?